Happy 38th birthday, Internet!
On this day in 1969, the first ever computer-to-computer link was estapblished on ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet. It was developed by a U.S. Governmental team called DARPA, which sounds just a little too close for comfort to the plotline on Lost. But it actually stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Nope, that’s still pretty creepy.
But creepy or not, those brainiancs are indirectly responsible for this website, this tidbit and your reading of it, coming into being. Switchboards, zeros and ones, hell who cares how they did it as long as I can illegally download what happens next on Battlestar Galactica. Cheers to you, creepy governmental operations, and please keep ’em coming.
Incidentally, the first message was sent at 10:30 PM by UCLA student programmer Charley Kline and supervised by UCLA Professor Leonard Kleinrock. The message was sent from the UCLA SDS Sigma 7 Host computer to the SRI SDS 940 Host computer. The message itself was simply the word "login". The "l" and the "o" transmitted without problem but then the system crashed. Therefore, the first message on the Internet was "Lo". They were able to do the full login about an hour later.
I find it deeply disturbing that most of us here at ComicMix are older than the Internet.
Why? I'm older than the Internet, but at least I used ARPAnet (starting in 1977). I wrote my first program in 1963 when I was eight and had to punch it onto paper tape and take it to the giant building full of computer. The internet as we know it is much much younger.